Suppose that what ultimately matters is the objective goodness of what you do – where the objective goodness of an action is determined by the action’s actual outcome, not merely by the expected outcome. But suppose that you usually don’t know for certain what degree […] Read More
Classical decision theory is built around a central "representation theorem": so long as an agent’s preferences meet certain basic conditions of coherence, we can construct a function that represents the agent’s preferences — in the sense that the agent prefers one prospect X over a […] Read More
Practical conditionals are a problem. We all use conditionals like, “If you want a great steak, you ought to go to Manny’s Steak House.” But suppose I do want a great steak; does it follow that I ought to go to Manny’s? No—maybe my doctor […] Read More
Currently, epistemologists seem to be very interested in practical reasons and practical rationality. One good example of this is an interesting new paper entitled ‘Knowledge and Action’ by John Hawthorne and Jason Stanley (here) forthcoming in the Journal of Philosophy. Usually, when I read epistemologists […] Read More
Update (13 August, 2007). I’ve now written a very short paper on this issue: How to Live a Life Worth Living. As you’ll see, it was significantly influenced by useful comments I received here. The recent discussion of McTaggart initiated by Kris has been very […] Read More
Congratulations to our own Troy Jollimore for the very positive review he just got in this past Sunday’s NY Times for his book of poems Tom Thomson in Purgatory. Here are some excerpts from the review: "Troy Jollimore writes a different kind of American poem: […] Read More
The summer fun continues. Here’s a cool question raised by McT, quoted below: "Both good and evil are quantitative. …. Good values then form a series, as do evil values. And these two constitute together the single series of values, of which the generating relation […] Read More
Folks, it’s time for some summer fun. And everyone knows what that means — it means McTaggart! Here’s a question McTaggart wondered about. McTaggart’s discussion of the question appears in The Nature of Existence, vol II., Chapter LXVII. Suppose that pleasure is intrinsically good, and […] Read More
Derek Parfit has recently circulated an argument against what he calls Non-Analytical Naturalism, which he understands as the thesis that normative truths are reducible to natural truths. He begins by stipulating that he will use ‘normative’ as an abbreviation for ‘irreducibly normative’: When some normative […] Read More